An Act Appropriating Funds for Operation of the Bangsamoro Government from January One to December Thirty-One, Two Thousand and Twenty-Three and for Other Purposes

This is the region's proposed budget for 2023 — the FY 2023 Bangsamoro Expenditure Program, ₱85,359,315,687.00, filed as a cabinet bill and enacted as BAA 32 with the total unchanged.

Section 1 names where the money comes from: the annual block grant, other subsidies from the National Government, the region's share of national taxes, fees and charges collected inside its territory, unutilized prior years' appropriations sitting in the Bangsamoro Treasury, and projected collections on the region's own taxes, fees and charges.

The volume runs to some 270 pages and funds 17 ministries, 11 other executive offices and 5 special purpose funds — Personnel Gratuity, Miscellaneous Personnel Benefits, Contingent, Special Development, and the Local Government Support Fund — followed by a staffing summary and 24 pages of general provisions.

Three of those general provisions do more than housekeeping, and all 3 are in the bill as filed rather than added later. Section 18 requires every ministry and office to buy common-use supplies through the Procurement Service, with local governments free to do the same. Section 21 caps engineering and administrative overhead at 1% of project funds, and only for infrastructure costing more than ₱1,000,000. And Section 50 provides that funds transferred between organizational units within a ministry, between ministries, or from a ministry out to a local government are not considered disbursed until the transferred amounts have actually been used to pay for completed construction, goods delivered and services rendered, inspected and accepted within the validity period.

Section 50 also sets the year's clock: appropriations available until 31 December 2023, infrastructure completion and payment to 30 June 2024, delivery and payment of operating and other capital items to 31 March 2024, with unreleased appropriations lapsing and unexpended funds reverting to the Treasury under a Special Fund for reappropriation.

An annual appropriations bill needs no explanatory note and this one has none. Its argument is its arithmetic.

What the bill does argue, in its general provisions, is about control rather than allocation. Routing common-use supplies through a central procurement service, capping project overhead at 1%, and refusing to count a transfer as a disbursement are 3 answers to the same question: whether the money the budget reports as spent has actually bought anything. That question is the one the region's own extension bills — 127, 128, 179, 265 and 266 — keep raising without answering.

The total did not move. ₱85,359,315,687.00 is what the Government of the Day proposed and ₱85,359,315,687.00 is what BAA 32 appropriates, to the peso. A legislature reviewing an executive budget and returning the identical figure is a fact about this Parliament worth recording plainly, and it is visible only by reading the filed bill against the act.

The 3 provisions that make this budget notable are also the cabinet's, not Parliament's. Section 50's transfer rule — the one that stops a ministry counting money as spent the moment it moves it somewhere else — is in the bill as filed, as are the Procurement Service requirement and the 1% overhead cap. It is the finance ministry tightening the rules on itself and its colleagues, which is not the direction these things usually run. The same transfer rule reappears a year later in Bill No. 266, extending it into the 2023 budget's afterlife, so whoever drafted it kept at it.

There is one conflict inside the document that a reader should know about. General provision Section 21 caps engineering and administrative overhead at 1% of project funds for all ministries and offices. The special provisions for the Ministry of Public Works authorise it to deduct a maximum of 3%, and up to 2% for releases to District Engineering Offices, for the same purpose on the same class of projects. Two ceilings, 1 document, and nothing on the face of the bill that says which governs the ministry that builds most of the region's infrastructure.

Read alongside the extension bills, the budget's control provisions look less like routine drafting and less like optimism. A government that in the same period was repeatedly legislating to keep unspent appropriations alive was also writing rules to make sure the spending it did report was real. Both things are responses to the same underlying problem, and only 1 of them is usually discussed.